The Stories Behind the Photos on 6 Iconic Album Covers

The portrait album cover is as common as it is routinely unremarkable. But sometimes, the right pairing of photographer and musician leads to career-defining imagery for both parties—sights that distill complex sounds. Some of those working relationships ended up imploding; others led to ongoing visual collaborations. The recently released book Total Records: Photography and the Art of the Album Cover explores these dynamics, and the stunning pictures that emerged from them. We spoke with the book’s editor, curator and photo historian Antoine de Beaupré, to trace the origins of six covers that simultaneously highlight the best of art photography.

Miles Davis' In a Silent Way (1969) // Lee Friedlander

In the late ’60s, photographer Lee Friedlander was commissioned by labels like Atlantic, Columbia, and Capitol to create covers for jazz greats like Ray Charles, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis. Beaupré identified the photograph on the cover of Davis’ In a Silent Way as the point after which Friedlander “became an artistic photographer and recognized as an art photographer.” He became famous in the art world for his roving yet meditative self-portraits—of his shadow morphing with a tree’s silhouette, communing with a landscape’s expanse, or projected onto a woman’s fur coat. But in 1969, he was solely a commercial photographer working on contract assignments.

Recorded in a single session and spliced together later, In a Silent Way also marked a seismic shift in Davis’ career. This was the start of his “electric” period, in which his albums sounded as much, if not more, like rock as they did jazz. In Total Records, music journalist Jacques Denis describes Davis’ expression in the photo as “feverishly serene,” embodying the musician’s at times restrained, but no less intense, compositions on In a Silent Way. Denis aptly wrote that Friedlander “retained the taste for improvisation” and “spur-of-the-moment composition” from jazz. Like Davis, he “seized the instant, the vibration of the moment” and distilled it into memorable, emotionally resonant work.

The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. (1972) // Robert Frank

After the Stones rejected Dada icon Man Ray’s polished proposal for the cover of their tenth album, they turned to the documentary photographer Robert Frank for grittier imagery. In the seminal book The Americans, published 14 years earlier, Frank had captured wayward youths, addicts, and people living on the margins of society. It was this raw realism that compelled Mick Jagger to invite Frank to Los Angeles to shoot the artwork.

Frank photographed band members walking around seedy parts of L.A.’s own Main Street, mostly emerging with discrete headshots. After the photos were developed, John Van Hamersveld—who put together the album package—interspersed these portraits with images from The Americans into a black and white contact sheet of bold characters: circus performers and such on the front, the Stones on the back. “I had made a package that was not glamorous,” Hamersveld once noted. “It was not a friendly image to put on display in the record stores, but it was that image that established the anti-establishment look of punk.”

Many Stones fans point to Exile on Main St. as the height of their golden age, but also the tipping point, after which money and drugs and fame consumed the band. “If Exile on Main St. isn't the sound of the Rolling Stones dying,” one critic wrote, “it is at least the sound of them going down in flames. But what a sound, and what flames.”

Patti Smith’s Horses (1975) // Robert Mapplethorpe

As she writes in Just Kids, Patti Smith met Robert Mapplethorpe in the summer of 1967, becoming fast friends, then lovers and creative collaborators. For the cover of her classic debut, Smith used a photograph Mapplethorpe took in his partner Sam Wagstaff’s One Fifth Avenue penthouse. “There was never any question that Robert would take the portrait for the cover of Horses,” she wrote. “My aural sword [was] sheathed with Robert’s image.” At the time the portrait was taken, the two had known each other for almost a decade, cycling through variegated periods of intimacy. Looking at the portrait now, Smith said, “I never see me. I see us.”

Unlike Mapplethorpe’s later work, which fixated on explicit sadomasochistic themes, this shot is a straightforward portrait that didn’t court controversy, though it does play a little with gender. Smith’s look as captured on the Horses cover came to define androgynous style for decades to come. “The only rule we had was, Robert told me if I wore a white shirt, not to wear a dirty one,” Smith told NPR. “I got my favorite ribbon and my favorite jacket, and he took about 12 pictures. By the eighth one he said, ‘I got it.’”

Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues (1983) // Robert Rauschenberg

This one’s more art-world oddity than classic cover, but it’s not hard to see how it influenced today’s offerings of colored and printed special-edition vinyl. The Grammy-winning artwork for the Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues is flecked with found photos printed in cyan, magenta, and yellow. The entire thing is based on Rauschenberg’s 1967 sculpture “Revolver,” which is comprised of five Plexiglass discs that revolve around a central axis when observers flip a switch. Because of production problems, the LP was printed in a limited-edition run of 50,000, making it something of a high-value collectible. Byrne designed the cover that most people associate with the album.

To get the layered visual effect, Rauschenberg printed collaged photographs on acetate—as Beaupré put it, “literally and figuratively enriching the colorful vinyl record.” Text fragments divide the wild patterns into discrete sections, and shapes intersect at odd angles, making each part indistinguishable from the next. Much like David Byrne’s musical style, the result is an innovative melding of techniques that defies easy categorization. As Byrne wrote in the Times, “Being around Bob was often like being on some kind of ecstatic drug—he inspired those around him to not only think outside of the box, but to question the box’s very existence.”

Grace Jones’ Island Life (1985) // Jean-Paul Goude

The illustrator, photographer, and graphic designer Jean-Paul Goude saw Grace Jones as his muse—someone who, to him, was “beautiful and grotesque at the same time.” The duo collaborated on many projects over the course of their respective careers, but the Island Life cover remains cemented in our collective cultural memory. Much of Goude’s work is considered controversial, as it fed into an exoticized, hyper-sexualized view of black women.

In the photo, which was first published in New York Magazine in 1977, Jones is in an arabesque position, her skin glistening like metal shined to a high-polish finish. Goude, who famously called himself an “author of images,” stitched together photos from various angles to create this anatomically impossible composite image. “I cut her legs apart, lengthened them, and turned her body completely to face the audience… then I started painting, joining up all those pieces to give the illusion that… she was capable of assuming such a position,” he wrote in his book Jungle Fever. These days, Goude refers to this distortion technique as “credible illusion” or “French correction.”

In 1979, well before Island Life’s release, Goude and Jones’ fraught, at times violent creative and romantic relationship reached a breaking point, after Jones announced that she was pregnant with their child. “I had no intention of staying with her,” Goude said, “I wasn’t happy with it.” In an interview with Goude himself for V Magazine, Jones characterized their relationship as unlike any other partnership in her life, referring to Goude as “the only man who made me buckle at my knees.”

Prince’s Lovesexy (1988) // Jean-Baptiste Mondino

French photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino told Beaupré that before he met Prince, he was “completely under his spell.” The photographer was inspired by the “apocalyptic discourse” in Prince’s songs about spirituality and sexuality, finding the Purple One “kind of tantric.” Mondino’s fascination makes sense, given his ongoing music video collaborations with another pop icon most inspired by sex and religion, Madonna.

For the cover of Lovesexy, Mondino made a sketch, photographed Prince in a studio in Los Angeles, and then used the only retouching machine in Paris to manipulate the image, ultimately creating a collaged, orchid-flecked cover devoid of text. When Prince came to Paris to see the prints, he destroyed everything and told Mondino simply: “I think what you did with the flowers was the best.”

The cover, featuring a nude Prince with a somewhat phallic-looking flower stamen pointing upwards, was banned in several states—a “religious image par excellence,” as Mondino said. Beaupré compared Mondino’s sensibility to that of “a DJ with a 6-by-6 format” and “a man of ideas first and then a photographer.”